- Music
- 15 Mar 11
Radiohead Guitarist Gets His Ambient On For Second Soundtrack Project
Jonny Greenwood’s dissonant There Will Be Blood score was credited with reinventing the movie soundtrack (no matter that, to certain ears, it sounded like a dead ringer for the title theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture). For his second soundtrack – for Tran Anh Hung’s adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood – he cleaves to the same formula: a discordant mash-up of strings, ghostly chorals and atonal guitar (courtesy of the BBC Concert Orchestra and the Emperor Quartet). On the heels of the opinion splitting King Of Limbs, it isn’t a record that rewards cursory listening, with the inclusion of three Can songs initially overshadowing Greenwood’s original compositions. Approached as a purely ambient experience, however, it contains bright spots aplenty, conjuring a mood that is at once mysterious, gloomy and trembling with terrible beauty.